


Weight of The Mantle

by Rhinocio



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bisexual Lance, Gay Keith, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 18:24:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17688554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhinocio/pseuds/Rhinocio
Summary: Keith may have equanimously taken up the role of Black Paladin, but his confidence is wavering. He’s struggling to reconnect with his team. He’s too used to doing things independently. He’s two years more experienced in warfare, but two years less so in communicating. Maybe it’s these things that make expressing himself so difficult – or maybe it’s the inescapable kilometre of earth hovering over his head.





	Weight of The Mantle

**Author's Note:**

> Despite _[Principles of Gravity](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16094813/chapters/37590434)_ being four months overdue for a new chapter and now a handful of Voltron fix-it and alternate ending fics in the works, this one came to me like a fever dream and demanded it be written first. For those of you who like visuals (or who’re curious about cave bacon), the location is highkey based on the Jewel Cave National Monument in South Dakota, a place I and [CaveDwellers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaveDwellers/pseuds/CaveDwellers) hit up on our cross-continent summer road trip.
> 
> I decided that if Voltron takes place 50+ years from now and in a future where we’re sending humans to Jupiter’s moons, there’s no way Americans are _still_ using the Imperial system of measurement. Except I’m a Canadian and we use both Imperial _and_ Metric, so guess which moron had to use a converter for the entirety of this fic?
> 
> This takes place right around episode 7.01, and as per always, comments are critiques are appreciated!

Keith wakes up in blackness.

He assumes he must be in space, at first, because of course he is – where else would be so devoid of colour? Where else has he spent the last four years (give or take a time distortion) of his life? The astral plane had been filled with shimmering starlight – this is the complete opposite, so he must be somewhere between galaxies, swimming in dark matter. He blinks hard and repeatedly, and decides that it’s either that or he’s gone blind. Given his habit of diving headfirst into danger, both are strong possibilities.

He pushes himself into a seated position, and everything in him aches at the effort. His arms are tingling, and his head feels as though it’s spinning. Spots of light dance across his vision, and he has to take a deep breath to settle the pitch in his blood pressure. He pats the ground around himself, and realizes that there is, in fact, ground to pat, which puts a gaping hole in his space theory. There’s no sound he can identify as movement, nor any rumbling under his fingertips. He scrunches his forehead in thought, and tries to picture where he might be, and why – he’s answered with the _blip-blop_ of something dripping. 

The instinct to call forth his bayard kicks in immediately, and Keith momentarily blinds himself with the flash of its arrival and the ghostly glow of its accent lights. He cringes away from the shock, his eyes watering. When he realizes there’s been no reaction in sound or movement around him, he gives himself a second to adjust. The dim orangey haze behind his eyelids gives way to the pale blue of his weapon, and as his suit reacts to the bayard and lights up its own stripes, Keith becomes a tiny sun in an empty universe.

He’s surrounded by stone on all sides. 

How did he end up in a _cave?_

Keith summons the flashlight built into the bracer of his armour, and uses it to scan the cavern. It’s not a tall space, but there’s just enough room that he can stand without his hair brushing the ceiling, and it’s wide enough that the entire paladin team could fit inside, shoulder to shoulder. There’s a damp sheen to everything around him, and he can hear trickling drops of water somewhere nearby, suggesting why. The rock around him is all a sickly green-grey, though it looks black where jutting edges of its formation overlap. To his far right, pale crystal glimmers at him, catching the light like rows of teeth in a shark’s maw. It isn’t a comfortable space, but it isn’t the emptiness of the void either. He has a much better chance of surviving here than there. He turns to check on his team, and realizes, with a sweeping scan of his flashlight and a building sense of dread, that he’s by himself.

Keith calls out to his fellow paladins on his communicator, and then when his HUD tells him the air is safe to breathe, he phases back the visor on his helmet and calls out in person, too. His voice echoes back at him in the small space, loudly and immediately, which tells him there isn’t much more to this cave than what he can see. Still, he reasons he couldn’t have gotten in here without an entrance, so he runs a hand around the perimeter of the room, checking for shadowed passageways. 

His hands eventually notch in a crevice just big enough to squeeze through. Keith figures that if there’s a path to move into, then he ought to see where it goes, so he reaches forward and starts spelunking.

\----

Keith has been clomping over rocks, across ledges, and through rooms of varying size for about an hour now, according to the computer built into his armour. He makes his way through each cavern slowly, calling up his suit’s scanner to map each area as he goes. The screen glitches at him whenever he tries to map the larger cave system, though, and the error signal that pops up along with a cartoonish image of Pidge’s face suggests there might be something in the stone walls themselves distorting the signal. Keith isn’t familiar enough with natural or technological sciences to come up with a workaround to the issue, so he sticks to what scanning it allows him, and satisfies his frustration by hissing threats at the holoscreen each time it fails to do more.

He can’t scan to see how far from the surface he is, or how near he is to an exit. He knows only that things are wet and dark, and that he’s getting sick of the sounds of his own breathing echoing back at him. The drops of water that spill from the ceiling occasionally and bop him on the nose are irritating in their own right, but Keith feels certain that if he doesn’t find an escape from the dark isolation he’s going to start exhibiting symptoms of space madness. Lacking physical company to keep him sane, Keith turns to his memories.

He thinks about Krolia, and the techniques for handling intense missions she taught him during their long stint in the quantum abyss. He breathes deeply, and pictures the flickering fire pit they sat at each night, telling stories and sharing histories. He thinks of hard-won breakfasts, and chewing on salty alien meat while watching the satellite they’d camped on drift ever closer to what felt like the center of the universe. He thinks about the moment he mentally decided she was “Mom”, and the the way the realization patched the twenty year old hole in his heart. 

He worries about Shiro, recovering from implantation into the body of a clone, his hair a shock of white and his prosthetic arm severed. He thinks about the relief on his face and the warmth in his eyes as Keith held him, about the contact between them feeling a million years overdue. They once agreed to sail through space together, and Keith intends to make good on that promise.

He thinks about his team, and how foreign they all feel to him now. He knows he’s changed himself in the two years he spent drifting through space in a time-distorted zone, but somehow they seem like they’ve changed more. He hung on tight to the image of the paladins from their Voltron Show run, to the laughter and lightheartedness they all somehow maintained even at the frontlines of a war, but the people he came back to aren’t quite that anymore. He wants to know why. He wants to help fix it. 

He decides that he’s not letting a bunch of rocks get the better of him, let alone take him away from his family now that he’s finally got them all in one place. He’s faced worse than this pile of schist.

(Lance would have liked that joke.)

Keith glances up at the stalactites hovering over his head, and decides that out of the two of them, he’ll be the better conversationalist. He loudly curses out the cavern and the situation, and then starts to talk.

\----

It’s been three hours and change when Keith finally hears something besides himself and the water, and he can’t help wondering if it’s a hallucination. Someone is calling his name, responding to his voice, but the reverb of the stone walls has it sounding almost fabricated, like a lo-fi recording of a song he forget he knew. He turns towards it anyway. Friend or foe, imagined or not, having anything talk back to him is better than this endless solitude. Plus, his throat is getting hoarse.

He follows the sound as best he can, fumbling over the jutting stalagmites that aim to stab him in the hips as he goes, overstepping in valleys and tripping on hills. He wants to hurry towards the sound, but the terrain continually reminds him to be cautious or break a leg. He nearly slams into a wall, and when he topples forward to catch himself his hands find a crevice he has to exhale entirely to fit through. His armour groans with the effort. When the stone spits him out on the other side, into a room he can barely see the ceiling of, he finds himself much closer to the huffing and clear name-calling of what he’s starting to recognize as a familiar human voice. He forces himself onward, and starts shouting back.

He turns one surprisingly easy corner at as close to a run as he can manage, and it’s the hulking frame of Hunk that he sees, dashing towards him like he’s running for his life. The larger paladin is heaving for breath, his hands groping at the walls for balance, but his face lights up at the sight of Keith (metaphorically and physically – he cringes away as the beam of Keith’s flashlight hits him straight in the eyes). His foot slips as he rushes forward, and he falls to one knee, but his face stays lifted, and his arms reach out for Keith when the Black Paladin gets close enough to kneel with him. Hunk’s face is wet with probably both sweat and tears, and his breath comes in short gasps, suggesting it’s more than exertion holding tight to his lungs.

“I’m here, Hunk, it’s okay,” is what he says, gripping both his shoulders as a gesture of comfort and to keep the man from toppling forward. Hunk pats his arm with one hand and leans his forehead on the pauldron of Keith’s suit, resting long enough to steady his breathing. The inevitable questions come next.

“Where are we? What happened?”

They start from there. The room they’re in has space enough for them to settle, so they find makeshift chairs and sit, posing suggestions on where they might be. The ceiling far above echoes their words like a cathedral, but the expanse seems infinitely less lonely with two voices instead of Keith’s alone.

“There was some kind of fight, I remember that much,” says Hunk, running his fingers through his hair over and over, more to soothe himself than to accomplish any sort of straightening out. He keeps his eyes downcast, refusing to look into the endless black surrounding them. The blue haze of their suits is like a fire between them, pushing back the looming shadows of the cave and making the calcite around them glimmer. “We were flying the lions, and you told us to form Voltron, and I’m pretty sure we did. Maybe? What do you remember from it?”

“Allura… disappeared,” Keith replies slowly, and worry spikes through him, hissing all kinds of insidious things about what could have happened to his paladins. He can see flashes of laser fire in his mind’s eye, and hear the shouts of his friends as the blue lion evaporates like smoke. He knows Pidge had started telling him something, explaining the phenomenon, but between the adrenaline then and his headache now, Keith can’t recall a word.

Hunk interrupts his thoughts before the fretting can get out of hand. “She did, but I think I know what happened to her. I think she’s alright.” He has a holoscreen pulled up on his bracer, and Keith stares at the symbols and charts he’s flicking through, illegible to him both because they’re mirrored and in Altean. “I’ve got a scan from Pidge here, timestamped from six varga ago. It’s fragmented – I think it got cut off halfway through the upload, but it looks like a reading of the molecular shift and explosive force that goes off every time that wolf of yours teleports, just at a greater magnitude. I think she was warped somewhere, and so were we.”

He pulls up a half-completed 3D model of something humanoid, with sharp angles and a scale reference too big to be any species of alien familiar to them. The program highlights the creature’s arms, and the backpack-like feature between its shoulder blades shows levels of detail in varying colours. Keith moves to sit where he can see the screen properly, and squints at the visual.

“Looks like a big robot.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. Ro-beast.” Hunk pinches his fingers on the screen and expands them to zoom in on what appears to be an elaborate set of coils on its back. “Most of the detail in the scan is in here, so I think that’s where Pidge was focusing. It must have used this thing to generate power, and the cannons on its hands to fire miniature time-space distortion zones. It probably wormholed us in here to get us away from the rest of the team.”

“What’re the chances Allura’s in here, too?” Keith wonders aloud, and he glances at Hunk’s paling face. The Yellow Paladin smacks his lips, and takes a careful look around the room, his expression one of dread, but he perks up when Keith remembers, “I have scans of the caverns I went through already, if that helps.”

Keith pulls up a screen on his armour, and with a quick swipe Hunk collects the information onto his own. He fiddles around with filters, repeatedly changing the scope on the images, and summons a secondary digital sketch pad to handwrite several equations. Keith follows along as best he can, recognising the mathematics as calculations of probability, and feels a sudden wave of awe and gratefulness for his fellow paladin’s genius. 

“I was too freaked out to scan the spots I walked through like you did,” Hunk says slowly, his finger hovering at the bottom of the holoscreen, and Keith realizes there’s a nervous shake to his voice, one that bleeds the confidence out of their collaborating like an ion blast through a battleship, “But given the amount of time it took us to find each other, and based on half the average human walking speed and average size of the cave rooms you scanned, this place is… probably big. If anybody else is in here, it’s gonna take a while to find them. I can’t work out any absolute likelihoods until I have a bigger sample size, so I think… I think we should map this place as we go, so I can get a better sense of the scale of it.”

\----

It’s a solid plan, until their suits start dying.

Keith notices the problem early on, but blames it on his eyes straining through the exasperating darkness, on his tiredness when he fails to sleep in the soggy, cold corner of the cave where they stop to rest. Hunk sits close enough that their feet touch, poking at holoscreens and muttering to himself. Though they’re both fairly certain there’s no animals they need to watch for, if the lack of breeze and light is any indicator, Hunk can’t help constantly checking over his shoulders, and neither of them can get comfortable. Keith does his best to rest his eyes, convinced that his sight is going bleary. It’s when he rubs his face and squints at Hunk some hours later that he wonders what’s really making things seem dim.

“You’re seeing it too,” Hunk says, but what he really means is that they’re seeing less, that the definition on his screen is growing fuzzy, that the glow of their suits isn’t cascading quite as far around them as it was before, that the whole room feels bigger and darker and they’ve shrunken in its hugeness. “Keith, I think our suits are powering down.”

“What are they even powered on?” he has to ask, because he’s only ever thought of them as suits of advanced armour, and it hasn’t occurred to him that their technological aspects might need charging. He’s never considered that the parts of the suit that regulate the state of their bodies has a limit, because Earthling spacesuits are still running on lithium batteries, and Altean tech is thousands of years ahead of the game. He’s immediately thankful they can breathe the air here, because it’s obvious more than their light has an expiration date.

“What’s _all_ our stuff powered on?” laughs Hunk humourlessly. He shuts down his holoscreen as he rises to his feet, saying, “It’s quintessence, and there’s nothing nearby to glean it from.”

“Doesn’t everything have quintessence in it?”

“Tell that to the rocks.”

They walk on, motivated now more than ever to find an exit, because as they travel the blue glow of their suits slowly flickers, and they have to stumble closer together to keep each other in sight. So far they’ve only come upon small rooms and tight channels, but there’s always the chance they’ll discover a space with a metres-high ceiling, or a running river with a swift current, or a sudden chasm where they’d fall to a spiked end. The last thing they need is to lose each other in absolute darkness and have to start mapping their environment using sound. Keith’s galran heritage might give him better hearing than the average joe, but he’s not willing to forfeit the chance of escape on the slim possibility he can echolocate.

Hunk checks his clock far too frequently, counting hours and varga in equal measure, offering numerical explanations for why their stomachs are angrily growling at them. Having been in the middle of a battle when they were transported here, neither paladin is carrying food or water. Their supposedly-advanced suits aren’t built like the ones from Earth are, because they’re designed for combat, not excursions in space – there’s no recycling bodily fluids for potable water. What they have in their bodies now is all they have available, and Keith worries about how much they’ve been sweating in the humidity of the cave.

They both grimace when they discover ribbons of red and yellow crystal cascading down the walls of one of the narrow passages they have to squeeze through. Their stomachs growl loudly, and in tandem. Neither of them say a word, but the joke is unavoidable, and there’s a clear wry humour to finding ‘cave bacon’ when their bodies are screaming for something to eat. 

When Hunk suddenly shouts, “Quiznak!” and whips around to face him, Keith thinks perhaps he’s seen something, or twisted a limb in the tight crevices of the pathways they’ve been forging. But Hunk has his hands on the controls of his suit, and he’s slamming holographic buttons like they’ve insulted his mother. He swears at himself a hundred different ways in at least three languages before the blue lines of light on his suit dim down to nearly nothing; there’s only a faint hum of illumination at his ankles and a fulgurating screen at his wrist left behind. It’s barely enough to see each other by, and leaves Keith looking at a spectre in the void, a Hunk-like outline washed of colour. 

“C’mere,” he beckons, reaching for Keith and furiously pulling up the same prompts on his suit, grumbling, “I should have thought of this earlier. We need to save power–” and Keith watches his own light fade away like the last smolders of a candle wick. His eyes fight the lack, and despite common sense he hangs on to Hunk’s arm, just to be sure the other man is still there. 

They hike on, and at the marker of twenty-four hours Keith calls for another rest. Hunk collapses into the nearest wall, his armour creaking as he slides along its jagged face. Keith sits himself down carefully, his arms shaking with the effort and the taste of lactic acid thick on the back of his tongue.

“Why can’t the suits use our quintessence?” he asks, staring at the curves of his boots, where faint light proves he’s still an entity with a real body. 

“I don’t know about you, buddy,” says Hunk, and Keith knows he isn’t optimistic about their situation because he’s all sass now, with a sharp edge to his to his tone that reeks of anxiety, “But I don’t have a lot of oomph to give right now. You know how we’re always beat after battle? That’s not just the adrenaline. Pidge and I studied some of Coran’s medical charts while you were gone, looked into some old records on quintessence and Altean tech–” He pauses, swallowing thickly, as if he’s fighting to conjure any sort of moisture to his throat. “We wanted to know how it worked, if the metaphysical bonds we have with the lions amount to anything scientifically. Basically we, like, quintessence-fuse with them. They take on part of our essence and use that for forming Voltron and powering up weapons and–” with a displeased grunt, Hunk cuts himself off again, and instead waves a hand Keith can barely see. “Et cetera. The fight dried us out. We don’t have the quintessence to give.”

––--

The next pause in their journey is one made out of sheer desperation. Keith is the deviant, driven to his limit with thirst. He veers so suddenly off the forward path he’s been cutting that Hunk struggles to follow, and yells at him, and they both fire a few curses off at each other because there’s little else left they can do. Keith makes for the sound of droplets, reaching out until his hands find a wall, and presses his nose to it like a bloodhound searching for a scent. The stone scrapes at his skin and he undoubtedly looks like an imbecile. Hunk gets close enough to see what he’s doing, which by this point is far into his personal bubble, and sighs, “Keith?”

“Water,” is all he bothers saying, and scuffs his way along the wall with the one point of exposed skin he has available, feeling for moisture. Keith doesn’t care anymore about how stupid he looks, all that matters is the thirst, and when he presses his dry tongue to the wall it’s not nearly as wet as he wants, but it’s something. 

Hunk is still for long enough to mentally gather what he’s doing, and then mimics him in the opposite direction. It’s the first time they’ve been so far apart since the found each other, and Keith registers vaguely that that could be problematic, since he has no idea how big this room is. But his body is screaming for fluids, so he ignores the mental comment and presses his lips to the wall in some bizarre effigy of a kiss, begging the rock to become a sponge under his enthusiasm.

“Over here!” comes Hunk’s voice from the far side of the room, and Keith beelines as best he can towards it, though by this point his eyes are useless and he’s guessing at distance. He stumbles, and calls out to Hunk to keep talking to mark his location. The repeat calls are periodically interrupted by gasping, as the Yellow Paladin ostensibly drinks up what water he can from the cavern, and they play Marco Polo until the faintest glow of his suit appears in the dark. A hand reaches out to him, and guides his trembling grip to a tiny rivulet of liquid at the tip of what must be a massive stalactite.

“Tastes like iron,” Hunk says, but there’s humour in his voice again, and he chuckles when Keith taps his arm to signal he can have another go at the hamster watering spout they’re paying homage to, adding, “This is crazy.”

They sleep next to the water. This time Hunk crashes out immediately next to him, shoulder to shoulder and eventually with a head pressing into his, and they spend probably too long after waking taking turns at the natural fountain again. The small amount of hydration they glean from it isn’t enough, and some deeply instinctual part of Keith’s brain is furious at him when they leave the water behind, especially without packing some to go. But they have no forms of storage, and the cave is a moist one, and if they’re lucky they’ll find a new spot to drink from, or better, a way out.

\----

They don’t.

No natural fountains or subterranean rivers materialize for their dry throats, nor do the rare water droplets falling from the ceiling offer more than taunting specks of relief for their sweat-soaked brows. Hunk ravages every storage compartment on his armour, but he finds no emergency rations to stave off the stabbing hunger that grips their insides with increasing harshness, and in fact his efforts are punished with a furious wave of nausea that has him doubled over and vomiting into the dark. Keith chews the inside of his cheeks raw as he walks, satiating his craving for food with the sensation and whatever edible delicacies he can imagine. The cave offers them mockery in place of hospitality – they sleep on beds of stone nails when they become too tired to move, and walk endless caverns when the gaping emptiness in their stomachs becomes too insistent to stay still. The paladins don’t find water, or food, or a way to escape their stone prison.

Instead, they find their suits struggling to stay lit, the bare luminance left in them shivering like dying embers in a cold breeze. Walking onward in absolute darkness feels like the worst possible thing they could have to deal with, short of dying, but if they want any power left in their armour for a quick jetpack launch or distress call, it’s an inevitable compromise. Hunk is solemn when he calls up the faint lines of his holoscreen to turn off their last running programs. He takes out his own, first, with a gasping breath like he’s pulling the cord on a life stasis machine. When he takes up Keith’s arm he pauses, and uses the limited glow to make direct eye contact and say, “I’m sorry, man. I’m so sorry.”

Keith could ask him why, but he’s certain Hunk’s reasons match his own: because he didn’t do better, didn’t find them a way out soon enough, because something he did in their fight against the Ro-beast put them here in the first place. Because he’s supposed to be reliable and forward-thinking, and he’s at his wit’s end. Because this feels like insanity, and he doesn’t want to drag his friend down with him. 

So Keith switches his grip, and fits his stubby fingers between the spaces of Hunk’s wide ones, and holds on tight as he assures him, “I’ll be right here with you.”

Hunk steels himself with a slow exhale as he knocks out the glow of Keith’s suit, and darkness falls like a curtain closing on an empty theatre, like thick clouds rolling over a silver moon, like the fire of a sun crossing the event horizon of a black hole. His eyes search desperately through the blackness, straining, but bring nothing back to him. This is absolute night, a pitch as deep and endless as the void of universe, as ancient as the core of this planet. Keith feels the moment his pupils give up their ambitious attempt to give him sight, and goosebumps rise across his skin as his other senses rush to fill the lack.

Hunk clutches his palm so tightly his knuckles pop, and the sound of him shifting closer is piercingly loud as Keith’s ears take up attention in stead of his eyes. He pulls Keith’s hand into the folds of his chest and tucks it below his chin, and even through the fabric of his flight suit Keith can feel the warmth of his breath as he pants, terrified. 

“I’m right here,” the Black Paladin says, and leans into the contact. He doesn’t have the energy left to feel uncomfortable, or to tense in his teammate’s embrace. Honestly, he’s gone too long without contact with his fellow paladins anyway – maybe this is the universe’s way of forcing him into some semblance of a hug.

They move slowly and clumsily from then on, a single unit with no grace, and Keith has to hold an arm in front of his face to ward of the sudden approach of walls. Their travel speed is a fraction of what it was, since they now scan for divots between walls with their hands and ears alone, and have to forge passageways in the stone with blind faith. They check for dampness in every new area, constantly searching for water. The only light is the sparkling flashes that flutter across Keith’s vision when he turns too fast or the lack of food catches up to him – he almost considers spinning in circles just to keep the stars present and give some semblance of life to the infinite blackness of the cave.

Space never felt this empty, nor this vast. Each new cavern feels like it’s as wide as the horizon, and as untouchable as the night sky. When they find a rocky incline and start to climb, it’s as though they’re scaling the face of Everest, desperately stumbling their way to an impossible peak. Still, the land evens out, and Keith’s hands ram a wall, and their voices always bounce back to them, like the company of a chorus of ghosts.

The privacy of blindness gives them an opportunity to talk about anything, but somehow the topic turns to loved ones. Keith learns that his teammate has a huge family, something he has in common with Lance. They wonder about Allura’s history, and the friends she might have had before them. Keith even tells Hunk a story about when he was young and still in the care of his father, nostalgically detailing what it felt like to sit in the desert together and map the stars.

Sometimes Hunk sings. He has a handsome voice, despite the way the dryness of his throat sometimes causes it to catch, and Keith tells him so. The songs Keith recognizes are old, and the ones he doesn’t are straight from Hunk’s memories. The Yellow Paladin tries to explain the nuances of a traditional Samoan ballad his mother taught him, but can’t remember the fable that goes with it. There are others he makes up the lyrics for, ones they laugh over, but there’s an edge to the humour that wonders why they can’t recall the words.

“I’m glad it’s you here with me, Keith,” his companion says quietly, as they slouch against an impending incline and try to rally the effort to move, “I mean, I’m not glad you’re here, but– but I’m thankful it’s you.”

Keith is all at once touched, and terrified. For all the family Hunk has, for all the close friends he’s made and adoring fans he’s rescued as a paladin, Keith shouldn’t be the person he dies with in a dark hole they can’t escape. He deserves more than a teammate who ran away.

\----

The growing tension comes to a head when Keith finds a space in one wall big enough to climb through, one with a breeze beyond it, a whisper of wind that licks at his skin when he shoves his face towards it. It screams _surface,_ and he’s as ready as a long-caged animal to break free of the confines of the humid cavern. It’s a horizontal window, and lower to the ground than is comfortable, but he drives his shoulders through it anyway, hanging tight to Hunk’s hand and reaching to the other side to pull his body sideways. He swallows a wave of panic as the space presses too tightly around his ribs, squeezing air from his lungs, and decides he must either give his all or become a permanent fixture of the rock face.

He drops Hunk’s fingers and shoves himself forward. 

Keith realizes, as the stone vice releases him and he starts to fall, that perhaps he should have thought the action through.

The shattering crack to the front of his helmet is so much less of an issue than the sickening crunch of his arm as he collides with the ground, and his agonized shouting is decibels louder than any noise either of them have made thus far. 

He sucks in a strangled breath and rolls away from the pain, wrenching his forearm from the sharp wedge of stone that’s hanging onto it like a jawful of teeth, and the jostling has his voice breaking once again. He clenches his teeth against the want to puke, and vaguely registers that Hunk is calling for him. As he carefully pulls his left arm from where he’s cradled it against his stomach, it occurs to Keith that there’s no strength to the limb under the throbbing; a preliminary check to his armour reveals that the circular panel guarding the back of his hand is bent violently upwards.

“I’m okay,” he groans, squirming his way into a sitting position like a glitching robot. He tries slowly extending his elbow, and hisses as a burning pain flares through his limb. He dares not try to flex his fingers – the thought of it has Keith’s stomach clenching in horrible anticipation. He takes another slow breath. Somewhere to the left of him, fading and intensifying like the wails of an ambulance siren, he can hear Hunk sobbing his name, and the clacking of armour on stone. He shouts against the tide of noise, “I broke my wrist!”

But Hunk is making so much racket that either he can’t hear Keith at all or the words aren’t registering, so Keith hobbles his way onto his feet and back the way he came, wincing as he trips and reaching with his good arm to plot out a passable route back to the hole. As it turns out, he’s fallen down the sharp edge of an otherwise gradual slope, and though the stone is slick with moisture there are pockets in its formation for Keith to jam his toes into and tug himself upward with. His legs quiver with the exertion, and by the time he finally reaches the landing he has only enough energy to shuffle himself forward on his knees. He pats around the space where Hunk’s voice is loudest, and finally finds the hand outstretched to meet him. The grip is so strong Keith fears Hunk might break his other hand too.

The Yellow Paladin’s breath is ragged, full-out sobs making way for desperate gulps of air. Keith guides his trembling hand to his own cheek, so he can feel the human skin there, feel his lips moving as he reassures, “I’m here, Hunk, it’s alright, I’m right here.” But the sobs turn to wheezing anyway, and the gasping becomes raw and thin as Hunk falls into a state of panic. His free hand is clawing at the rock, and then reaching out to latch onto Keith’s arm with a death grip. 

Keith’s throat grows tight, but he keeps up his placating words. His shattered wrist throbs as he tries to lean closer, a secondary agonizing ache to match the twisting guilt in his gut. What kind of leader is he, leaving his paladin behind in his own hurry to escape? What kind of guidance is he offering, disappearing without a word? What kind of friend can he call himself, even, lost for how to comfort a companion who’s been nothing but kind to him?

He latches onto the latter sentiment and starts rubbing his thumb over Hunk’s knuckles, reminding him over and over that Keith is here with him and the darkness hasn’t swallowed him away. He peppers in suggestions for ways to calm down, things Shiro and Krolia taught him in what feels like another lifetime, murmuring, “Easy, Hunk, inhale slowly through your nose,” when his heaving sounds like it’s rattling his very lungs dry.

He doesn’t know how long they sit there, contorted around the terrain like snakes around ladders, or when Hunk’s impossibly frail breathing steadies out into slow, wet exhales. But he keeps talking, right up until Hunk finally whispers, “Keith, I don’t fit.”

The silence lasts too long. Keith feels himself go lightheaded at the realization.

Every iota of strength left in his body responds to his firm internal rejection of the words, and Keith staggers his way onto his feet to pat along the wall in search of another passage, a bigger gap. He walks laps back and forth along the wall, pounding at the stone until the side of his fist grows bruised, physically demanding it crumble before him. Nothing bows.

It’s at the far edge of the wall, past where he threw himself to a wrist-shattering stop and at a patch of especially slippery stone that Keith stumbles. He catches himself with his chest, and as his head dangles forward into empty air he realizes with a terrifying thrill that he’s on the edge of a sheer drop. Carefully he pushes himself up to a seat and traces a hand around the lip of the precipice, listening intently as far-off drops of water plink into the basin of the cave. Keith unlatches the unnecessary armour guarding his ankle and drops it over the side to count seconds, and his crude math tells him the bottom must be a good twenty metres down. His heart sinks into his feet. 

He needs to map the rest of the area, and carefully. Sliding down the incline he had spent so much effort climbing up is disheartening, but terror overtakes the emotion as the slimy calcite under him sends him skidding uncontrollably towards an unseen landing. Keith’s pulse is racing when his right hand finally latches onto the lumpy tip of a stalagmite and slows his decent. He takes a second to steel himself, and then cautiously inches himself forward until his heels find yet another edge, one he then outlines with the back of a leg, crab-walking on two good limbs.

Keith bears heavy feet and a stunned mind when he finally fumbles his way back to Hunk. 

Their hands find each other automatically. The Yellow Paladin is calmer now, but his dry sobs are audible. Keith feels too sick to cry. The touch of Hunk’s hair tickles Keith’s arm as he curls into the stone window and hugs their intertwined fingers as close to his chest as he’s able. 

“Well,” Hunk says, when his sniffling has finally gone silent, “I’ve cried all my water out. You should– you should go, Keith.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he barks back, rough with anger at himself and brittle with stress. He tightens his grip, leaning forwards and until his lips rest nearly against the back of his wrist. Hunk inhales shakily, and shifts away.

Dim light flickers up under his friend’s face, painting it in a ghastly green glow that makes him look twice as harrowed as they both feel. The holoscreen he’s summoned is blinding, despite sitting at a fraction of its usual brightness, and Keith almost flinches away from the sudden visual stimuli. With quick fingers Hunk punches the buttons, though his dead expression betrays any hope in the gesture. The cheerful beeps of the screen relaying what it’s scanned are met with slowly closing eyes, and the luminosity falls away like a sunset swallowed by the sea. The mammalian ancestry inside Keith screams with desperation to keep it, exhausted by the perpetual night. 

“No, Keith, listen– there’s no exit to this room. Only the ways we came in, and the way you’ve gotten out. If I backtrack in the dark and by myself, I’m gonna die.” He inhales loudly, steadying himself, and Keith reaches to touch his arm. “It makes the most sense for you to continue on and find where this cave system opens to the surface.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“I don’t want you to. But it’s that or we’re both toast. Think of it this way: I’ve got wall water and body fat to sustain me, and as long as I don’t crack my head on anything I’ll just– I can just wait. I’m– I’m probably okay for a couple of days. You’ve gotta find a way out and get help.” 

Nothing about his tone sounds confident – Keith can hear the waver in his words, and the resignation in the way he gently squeezes Keith’s knuckles. He almost wants to follow the directions and prove to Hunk he can be trusted, that he has no intent to ever abandon his team again, that despite his screw ups and his clumsy handle on being the Black Paladin, he’s going to do right by everyone he loves. But the reality is, he has only the option to take up the role of a Titanic captain, and sink alongside his crew.

“I’m on a ledge, Hunk,” he says, his stomach churning at the words. Even in the darkness he can’t help looking away, shame siphoning the power from his voice. Hunk freezes, and then starts rubbing the back of his hand, trying the same small comfort Keith has been offering this whole time. “It’s too big a drop to jump, and I can’t climb down with a busted wrist. We’re stuck here.”

\----

“I’m sorry I lead you into the fight with the Ro-beast. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. I should have protected you.”

“I don’t blame you, Keith,” says Hunk, his response quiet but tenderness genuine.

“It doesn’t matter. This shouldn’t have happened.”

There’s a humourless laugh from the other side of the wall, breathy and short, and fury bubbles up inside Keith at the sound. Hunk doesn’t need to put into words how ironic the sentence is to a teenage engineering cadet pushed to the frontline of an intergalactic war, doesn’t have to explain how often the shouldn’ts and can’ts and won’ts in their messed up history have backhanded them. Hunk and Keith are dually familiar with the unsympathetic universe they’ve committed themselves to, and there’s no way to phrase the injustices done against them in a way that doesn’t sound like _I told you so._

Still, this isn’t the first time Keith’s been in an impossible situation, nor will it be the final time he tries to claw a way out of it. He shoves his broken arm through the gap and instructs Hunk to power up his suit, clenching his teeth against the jostling. He tells Hunk to move away from the wall and put on his helmet. He shuffles himself back as far as he can, testing for the spot where the platform he’s on dips off into a hill, and stops just before it. He places a hand to the thigh of his suit, and focuses on summoning his bayard.

Light fractures his vision as it appears like a supernova in the palm of his hand. Keith grips it with as much force as he can manage, and begs it to form a weapon. He needs something with firepower, something that can blast down the wall and illuminate the room and rescue them from a slow death in darkness, and he wills every bit of his own quintessence into the effort.

The glowing of his suit flickers down to nothing. His bayard refuses to form.

Furious, Keith throws it at the ground, and hears it clatter away.

\----

“Hey, Keith,” says Hunk, “Can I… tell you some stuff?”

“Sure.”

“Pidge. Do you think the others’ll keep an eye on her? She told me she only had her brother before Voltron and we’re– I’m her best friend. We get each other. I don’t want her to be alone. I know the team loves her, but she’s still… reduced to just the smart kid, the tech person. I wanted to make sure she knew she was more than that. Do you think–”

“She knows.”

Hunk sighs. His helmet clunks against the wall where he’s slouching, his thumb fidgeting over Keith’s index finger. 

“I miss my family. I miss them so _stupid_ much. But, y’know, it’s not so bad. They’re billions of lightyears from this galaxy. It’s taken the Galran Empire ten thousand years to conquer this chunk of space, and there’s nothing in our solar system they’d be attracted to. Earth’d be the last stop on a Milky Way invasion.” He’s thinking out loud more than leading towards any concrete question or statement, and Keith remembers vaguely that Hunk has always been the sort to babble when he’s upset, to let his mouth run where others take to sprinting. “I must’ve tried a hundred times to make Mami’s coconut bread using food goo and grains from different Coalition planets, but never had any luck. I thought it’d be so funny to show up on Earth after years missing and just go, ‘Hey Mom, you taught me to bring _fa’apapa_ as a gift when visiting somebody’s house, and I happen to have some right here, so… can I come in?’”

“She’d be proud of you, Hunk,” Keith whispers, cheek pillowed on his upper arm, staring into nothingness, “I am.”

A long pause follows his words, one the cave echoes back like white noise in a subway tunnel. 

“Hey, I’m proud of you too,” Hunk says slowly, and Keith can feel eyes on the back of his head, and an intensifying press to his fingers. He wants to scoff at the words, or dryly thank Hunk for humouring him, but can’t muster the enthusiasm for either. Exhaustion has caught up with them both, and with no promise left of an escape Keith’s stores of stress-based energy have all but been depleted. He’s too worn to even be sorry for himself. Hunk nudges his arm. “It couldn’t have been easy leaving us all behind to train with the Blades. But you stuck with the decision, and you didn’t die, and you found your mom, and you came back. That’s impressive, man.”

Keith can’t help the sigh that puffs from his lips, rebutting the praise.

“We missed you,” he continues, stumbling on the words like he’d meant to hold them in, and the pause after has Keith’s heart hammering. If there was ever one glaring failure in his integration with the Blade of Marmora, it was his inability to steel his emotions. He’s told himself a thousand times not to wonder how his friends felt about his absence, and yet something deep in him perks up at the statement, latching hold of it like the undeterrable grip of a tractor beam. “We didn’t… talk about it. About missing you. But you could tell. The team’s dynamic wasn’t the same. It was quieter, and then none of us realized that Shiro– I mean, you would have known better than _any_ of us. There was so much going on, and so many things changing, and we only saw you for a couple seconds on a screen every few weeks, and– I just– I dunno if you know how much losing you messed us up.”

Keith swallows thickly, an apology working its way to his tongue. Hunk cuts him off before the words take shape.

“Look, I’m… kinda torn about it, okay? I’m _glad_ you went, ‘cause it seems like it was really good for you. And I get it, sometimes the best way to find yourself is to do something crazy. I’d be a way different person if I wasn’t a paladin, right?” He hums, and the sound isn’t so much thoughtful as disgruntled. “But we’d just gotten the hang of working together with you in the black lion, and you took off when missions started getting really complex. We could have used your experience.”

“Leaving the team behind didn’t make me a better leader,” Keith says quietly. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not looking for an apology, Keith,” is the immediate response, and Keith would find the words biting if not for the gentle way Hunk keeps rubbing his hand. “Being sorry for it now doesn’t change what it did to the team. Yeah, logistically everything got harder, but— look, things were different without you, and felt... bad. We’d turned into this weird little space family, and you just suddenly ran away. Like, did we do something wrong? Could we have helped you find what you needed? We were worried about you, man.” 

Keith sits up slowly. He’s mentally prepared himself a dozen times over for the justifiable anger of his teammates, imagined all the things they might say and the levels of upset he might have to weather. He’s armoured his emotions as best he can against assault, expecting mutiny and dissent, knowing that the moment he returned to the Castle of Lions he was exposing himself as a target. Given the clone situation with Shiro, he’d assumed the team’s frustration with him had just been pushed to a backburner, soon to be addressed with all the ire due.

Keith finds himself instead facing off against a tone he can only describe as concern. 

“I–” he begins, but his brain is processing at a fraction of its usual speed, lagging with hunger and bewilderment. His scripted explanations feel disingenuous, but he falls back to them while his brain desperately tries to understand what’s happening. “There were too many paladins, and Shiro was a better leader. He deserves to pilot the black lion.”

“Sure he does, but there’s nothing wrong with having reserves. Military’s full of them. So are sports teams, and theatre. Computers have backup files and secondary processors. The black lion accepted you both.”

“Lance was going to step down so I could fly Red, but he’s– he’s better as a pilot.”

“He’s gotten pretty good at physical combat in the last few months too. Even conjured a sword. The red lion would’ve flown with either of you, and you could both do recon and rescue on the ground.”

“The Blades had more use for me,” Keith flounders, leaning away as Hunk lobs each of his excuses back at him, quicker than he can conjure them up. There’s a growing intensity to the Yellow Paladin’s voice, and what feels like a building impatience with the conversation, even as his responses remain almost cheerful.

“I’m calling you out on that one, dude. You’re good at what you do, but they couldn’t have needed you more than an exclusive six person team did.”

“I wanted to know where I came from,” he says finally, the phrase slipping from his lips unbidden as Hunk undermines everything Keith’s been labelling as fact. He flinches back from his own words, his jaw clacking shut in shame. It sounds selfish to admit, feels selfish to have pursued. He had agreed to fight for a cause greater than himself, even chastised Pidge for chasing leads on her family, and then bailed the moment an opportunity to learn his own history appeared. He was a hypocrite at best, and a traitor at worst. His throat grows tight, and the follow-up comes at a whisper. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, man. Really.” Hunk’s voice is soft, and his left hand joins his right where he’s holding onto Keith’s, tugging him back into reality, out of his spiralling thoughts and the deep pit of guilt he’s stewing in. “Look, Keith, what I’m trying to say is you didn’t– you don’t have to earn a place on the team. Nobody expects or wants you to prove you should be kept around. You’re our friend. My friend. I just need to know I can trust you to talk to us the next time there’s a problem. Maybe the others have their own beef with you, but none of us hate you, and none of us expect you to be perfect.”

The cavern repeats his words, and Keith basks in the sound, letting it settle onto him and soak into his bones. He doesn’t know how to convey how much the information Hunk has given him means, but something in his chest he didn’t realize was raw has been soothed, hearing he was missed, and that he’s forgiven. He squeezes Hunk’s fingers tightly at the point their hands interlock. 

There’s a long silence before Hunk speaks again, coughing awkwardly.

“While we’re– on a similar topic, uh, he’d kill me if he knew I’d said this, but… Lance. He doesn’t talk about his own problems unless you really pry, and he’s too proud to ask for help most of the time. He’s been a mess since you left. I think he missed you the most, man.” Keith’s heart stutters, jolting to a stop like a stick shoved in the wheel of a bicycle and throwing him headfirst into tenderness. He’s both surprised and mollified knowing the way their stupid rivalry retrospectively felt like care wasn’t a conclusion made solely in his own head. “And I think he’s stuck on the idea of being perfect, too. He kinda set himself up with this whole identity as a ladies’ man and– he’s– you’re gay, right?”

Keith nods, eyebrows folded towards each other, and then adds a small grunt of acknowledgement when he remembers Hunk can’t see him.

“Lance likes boys and won’t admit it. He doesn’t know how to handle the idea, and I’ve been waiting for him to come talk to me about it but that– that’s not gonna happen. I was kinda hoping he’d talk to you, honestly, when you came back. He trusts you. I dunno, maybe it’d be less weird.”

“It’d be weirder,” Keith snorts, but he can hear the warmth in his own voice, the little spark of life Hunk’s kindness has infused into him despite their hopeless situation. Hunk laughs quietly, and Keith could swear he hears the telltale sound of tears dropping onto the rocks. But the sound repeats, building until the Black Paladin is beyond concerned for Hunk’s health and more convinced he’s hearing the trickle of water echoing from somewhere else. For the first time in what feels like an eternity, a thrill of _maybe_ perks Keith’s body back into action, and he taps at his paladin’s hand with urgent intensity.

He’s up and moving before he’s finished hissing, “I hear water, help me find it,” pausing only to curse as he trips and bumps his useless wrist. He can hear Hunk sighing, weighed down with exhaustion, but he inhales sharply and jumps to attention as Keith specifies, “Lots of water, like a stream!”

As though the words were the secret code the cave was waiting for, Keith turns back to his search and finds the darkness peeling back, arcs of glittering stone appearing through the gloom like fairy lights in a fog. There’s an eerie blue-green hue to the illumination, one that barely reaches where the wall divides the paladins, but that grows brighter as Keith skids his way down the hill to his left.

It’s wedged between stalagmites and drowning in a stream, but Keith’s bayard is stuttering to life with all the fervor of a sparking flint.

He doesn’t dare touch the weapon when he makes it there, only eyes it over and traces the path of the flow of water, noting the way it bubbles with enthusiasm and spurts from the far away ceiling like it’s escaping an Olympic-sized swimming pool. His throat grows tight, and Keith remembers suddenly that he’s _incredibly_ thirsty, so without preamble shoves his face into the watercourse and slurps. 

He’s never had anything so delicious. It’s the nectar of the gods. It’s pure white quintessence. It’s every meal his father ever cooked him, and a couple his mother didn’t burn, all made with love and patience. It’s the ice cream Shiro bought him the first day they spent together, it’s an alien delicacy science couldn’t explain with a million years of study. Keith has never felt more human than now, gulping down familiar H20 like it’s the only thing that’s ever mattered.

He doesn’t know how long he’s there, only that he has to pause and cough twice after inhaling the water by mistake, and once nearly throws up. Eventually he’s satiated enough to remember to breathe, and realizes that for as desperate his want of water, Hunk is probably suffering twice over – he’s done much more crying. Keith unbuckles the bracer on his broken arm and carefully dips it into the stream, scooping as much as he can for Hunk to drink. Walking uphill with it is nearly impossible, but he cradles the container and walks like he’s on a tightrope, and when he makes it back to the crevice in the wall they’ve been sitting at he offers the bracer like he’s serving up a fine whiskey at a bar counter.

“One order of armour water, sorry about the taste,” he jokes, but Hunk hardly registers the words as he downs the liquid with shaking fingers. Clearly one round isn’t enough, so Keith returns multiple times to refill the makeshift cup, pausing to drink more himself every time. By the time Hunk’s setting down the bracer with water still inside, Keith’s legs feel like gelatin. 

“The light’s coming from my bayard,” Keith explains, slurping up the rest of the drink himself, “It’s sitting in a stream as wide as my forearm and maybe eight centimetres deep.”

“You did good, team leader,” Hunk tells him, curling up on his forearms in the little window of space between them, as if he’s a contented cat preparing for a nap. His eyes are almost visible in the faint illumination, and the slow way he blinks up at Keith and smiles is riddled with trust. “Let it stay there. The negative ions of the flowing water must be charging it. If we have energy and water then there’s a chance for us.”

The waiting game is perhaps the worst they’ve played thus far. Knowing they now have some kind of solution, Keith itches to do more than sit around, even with his lack of energy. He wants to move, but needs to conserve his waning strength, so instead he maps what he can see of the room with lazy head movements. He discovers there are levels of the cave above them, just out of reach, platforms they could jetpack onto if their suits had any power to run on. He squints at the faces of the stone, willing handholds to become obvious to his tired eyes. The shadows persist, fought back only by the shine of his bayard, a dim faroff sun in a cloud of dark matter.

Keith mirrors his paladin’s position, curling up as best he can with one arm. Hunk’s breathing is slow and heavy beside him, and he’s thankful for the sound, signalling to him that he isn’t dead and that something exists beyond the endless stillness of the cave. His ears feel like they’re twitching at every drop of water and burble of the stream nearby, and he’s hyperaware of the driving hunger clawing at his throat and digging an angry pit in his stomach. 

Neither of them have dared pitch the question of how long they’ve been here – Keith’s time in the quantum abyss taught him better than to ponder the length of time he’s been away, or to think about the distance between himself and everything he loves. He knows not to wonder about all the bad that could happen in his absence. But Hunk has always has an impeccable sense of time, and his avoidance of the topic therefore says volumes.

Keith knows the river his bayard is bathing in has grown, now a touch wider than his arm and a pitch louder than before. He checks each time he fumbles over to hydrate, and drinks furiously whenever his stomach complains too insistently for food. The running water also reminds their bodies that they have their own metabolic jobs to do, and Hunk giggles all through their mutual bathroom break, his laughter increasing as Keith curses how difficult unfastening a flight suit with one hand is. 

“Biological graffiti!” Hunk cackles, as they introduce new parts of the cave to a more human liquid. They’ve turned their backs to each other and stepped as far away from the wall as possible, as if the dark isn’t already giving them privacy, as if it matters. There’s a touch of hysteria to their amusement, but Keith takes both the humour and bodily reactions as a good sign.

They joke about unclean hands, and Keith brings another round of armour water for the both of them, scooped up in Hunk’s larger bracer. They toast like they’ve experienced a victory, and Keith suspects his theory about space madness in an endless cavern is seeing proof.

“I wasn’t all that great at natural sciences,” Hunk says, swishing his water like a fine liqueur. “My grades at the Garrison would attest to that. It’s all numbers, all compositional analyses when you get down to it, and that’s more Pidge’s thing. I can tell you, hey, that’s a rock, but the hows and whys of its make and history, and what it means for human advancement? How about I just keep your scanners working, man, there’s a reason I chose engineering.”

Keith doesn’t question the choice of topic, happy to let his companion’s voice cut through the monotony while he stares longingly at the faint glowing of his weapon. But he can’t help the tension that holds tight to his lungs when he considers how he’ll probably only have a single opportunity to use it, given that it feels like it’s been charging for an eternity. Hunk follows his gaze.

“I’ve been thinking about those classes, though, specifically about when they covered irrigation and habitability. If I remember right, most wells on Earth are dug down only about a hundred and fifty metres, max.” There’s an intensity to his tone, one Keith recognizes as an implication. If drinkable groundwater sits in that range, and they’ve run into an underground river then logically… “We’re probably close to the surface, Keith.”

The Black Paladin swallows his nervousness and pats Hunks arm, offering a soft, “Yeah.”

\----

Keith dreams about sunrise. It hits his eyelids at just the right angle to be annoying, making him cringe and roll away from the glare. A sudden stabbing pain in his arm has him sitting upright with a yelp.

He groans and clutches at his wrist, leaning forward to stem the wave of nausea that roils in his gut. His hand feels like a baseball under his flight suit, throbbing under his touch and sending sharp electric jolts into his fingers. A clumsy touch reaches out and brushes his ribs as Hunk startles from his own sleep, woken by the noise. A garbled, “You okay?” cuts the silence, and Keith grunts in response. He takes a slow breath to steady himself, and glances up.

There’s a bold glow coming from across the room, one that’s lit the entire flow of water like a strip of fibre optic wire. Keith decides he’s done waiting, and immediately jumps to attention, shooting to his feet as quickly as the slimy floor and his bum arm will let him. He shouts at Hunk to back away from the wall as he moves. He slides down the hill on his knees and snatches up the bayard the second it’s within reach, and for the first time in what must be days, he can feel power buzzing under his palms. Carefully he turns towards the barrier, taking aim with all the precision he can manage, and wills the bayard to form.

The platform he’s on isn’t a large one, nor is the room around him, though the floor is far below and ready to impale him if he measures his shot incorrectly (equal and opposite reaction, and all that). He mutters a quick prayer to any and all omnipotent cosmic deities in the far reaches of space, then thinks of firepower, of Lance’s weapon on steroids, of anything big and strong enough to take down the wall and free his paladin. The edges of the bayard swell and press into his chest and shoulder, and weigh down on the hand he’s readied to fire. It grasps his forearm like an old friend, and shakes with anticipation. 

When he wills it to explode, there’s a resounding scream of laser fire, and a light so bright it blinds him. 

Hunk screams from the other side of the room. The force of the shot launches Keith backwards, and he scrabbles helplessly for something to hang onto as his feet skid over the ledge of the platform and hover above nothingness. Shrapnel whips by him, pummelling his body and cutting at his exposed skin, and clatters to a cacophonous end in the gorge far below.

The silence is long, as flatlined as a heartbeat. Keith’s ears are ringing. He can feel his teeth rattling from the blast. But he’s also one wrong move away from falling, and his shuddering muscles demand he does something about that ASAP. He tugs himself forward like he’s floundering out of a hole in a frozen lake, as slowly as his burning triceps will let him, and curls onto his side the moment solid ground is available to all four of his limbs.

The cave already feels bigger. An edge has been taken off it’s claustrophobic aura, and Keith could swear there’s a whisper of a breeze. But the terrain is now a thousand times worse to try to maneuver, and Keith still has to gather his friend out of the wreckage. He forces his body to rise and collects his faintly glowing bayard, and calls for the Yellow Paladin.

He finds Hunk by hunting his groans and then tripping over his leg. Despite common sense Keith still checks for signs of a steady heartbeat and breath, his hands too numb to really register either. Hunk moans, grunts, and then shifts, and the stones around them clack angrily as they fall away. He keeps leaning forward until his forehead is resting in the crook of Keith’s shoulder, and Keith touches his arm gently.

“Still here,” says Hunk.

They’re both weak and beyond worn out, but being reunited has instilled some semblance of hope to their quest, and both paladins latch onto it and each other with all the strength they can manage. Hunk keeps a hand on the upper part of Keith’s left arm as they cautiously make their way past what used to be the barrier between them, and the Black Paladin leads them both down the hill to the stream for a final bolstering drink. There’s just enough light left in his bayard to catch a glimpse of the rocky overhang above it, where the cave seems to continue on. He marks the spot by placing the dimming weapon on the ground, and after a quick discussion, they both turn to start grabbing rubble.

The paladins haul boulders over one by one, clumsily, especially in Keith’s case. He manages a sort of routine for shimmying stones with the elbow of his left arm into the cradle of his right, and squatting each time he needs to set the weight down. They pile the rocks into a pedestal, wide enough to stand on and half a metre high. When Hunk tests its height for what feels like the millionth time and confirms it’s tall enough to work, Keith finally lets out the breath he’s been holding, drops the stone in his arms with gusto, and clutches his broken wrist to his chest.

Hunk’s hands are in his vision within moments, reaching, and Keith reflexively inches away. But the touch is gentle, and he prods at the joint slowly once he leads it closer to the faint flickering of the bayard. As far as Keith is aware, the Yellow Paladin is no healer, but he hums over his wrist like he knows what he’s doing. He reaches up to untie the orange headband at his brow, and warns Keith to brace himself as he starts winding it around his hand.

“I’m not even gonna try to reset this,” he says, voice calm over Keith’s sharp breathing, “But it’s probably not a bad idea to keep some pressure on it.”

“Thanks,” Keith wheezes back, blinking saltwater out of his vision as Hunk clips his own larger bracer over the binding like a makeshift splint. It swallows Keith’s entire arm, leaving only his fingers exposed to the air. Hunk nods at his handiwork and turns back to the rock face, clambers onto the platform they’ve built, and with a heaving inhale hauls himself up to the higher floor – an incredible feat, given they’ve spent at least the last two days consuming only water. (Which isn’t to say the ascent is flawless, because he’s seen toddlers with more grace.) He calls for Keith when he’s oriented himself on the elevated platform, who tosses up his bayard. When Keith reaches up to meet the arm he’s put down, Hunk grabs him hard enough to bruise and yanks him up with herculean strength.

They spend a few minutes laying in the dirt, revelling in their progress and warning each other not to get too comfortable. At this point, even the cold, spiky floor of the cave feels inviting.

Returning to walking feels almost funny now, as if the stagnancy and trauma they’ve left behind was just a minor setback in their quest instead of a life-changing and potentially -ending event. Whether it’s for his own comfort or both their security Hunk keeps a grip on Keith’s hand, and Keith finds he doesn’t really mind, especially when he fumbles on a divot in the ground and the contact keeps him from faceplanting into the gypsum. Hunk leads, now, one hand reaching as if pushing back the darkness, and the light of the black bayard stays hugged to Keith’s chest, too dim to be used as a flashlight but comforting nonetheless.

\----

Keith suspects they’ve hit day three by the time they reach the biggest room in probably the entire cave system. He knows it’s big because their voices echo like they’re in a deep fissure of the Grand Canyon, pinging through the shadows like far off radio waves. Something about the place feels important, and both paladins pause, looking towards the cavernous void of the ceiling as if waiting for it to fill with a galaxy’s worth of stars.

Hunk roars, suddenly, the depth and power of his voice reverberating in Keith’s chest. From his lips booms what sounds like a line from a song in a language their suits probably couldn’t translate, as forceful as the earthquakes his lion conjures. The room responds in chorus, and the communicator on Keith’s arm sings back.

The little blip of acknowledgement comes as an incredible surprise, so unexpected that they both jump. They share a disbelieving look as their suits start gaining back colour, shimmering with a blue light as faint as cloud vapour. Keith thrusts his good arm at his friend, who quickly stabs the Respond button, and calls, “We’re here!”

The line cuts immediately. Hunk takes a steeling breath, one that rattles with fear, and it feels like a conductor to the building mutual tempo in their bloodstreams. His fingers are trembling as they cling tight to Keith’s. The tiny chirp of the communicator repeats on loop, caught in their bated breaths, never loud enough for the stone around them to hear.

“What was that?” the Black Paladin whispers.

“Something my grandpa used to do when he wanted to get everyone’s attention,” Hunk replies, his tone faint with awe, and though he’s misunderstood the question Keith can’t help but find the response satisfying. There’s an irony to the concept that matches the rest of their spacefaring life, and the sentiment is endearing. “I think they found us.”

There’s a burst of light, strobe-bright and disorienting, and Keith catches the faintest outline of something dark and menacing contrasted against it, moving towards them at a dash. His legs are too heavy to move, his reaction time dulled by exhaustion. Adrenaline finds no grip on his muscles. Keith crushes his eyes closed and readies for impact.

He’s tossed into weightlessness, deafness, and blindness all at once, stomach twisting, and it’s only a split second before Hunk’s death grip on his hand is yanking him forward and lobbing him face first into the ground. The momentum has his body twisting awkwardly, and Keith yelps as his arm is jostled and pinned under his own chest. His very bones feel like they’re vibrating. He vaguely registers that there are voices calling his name, and increasing activity around him, and that Hunk is still attached to him, groaning right by his ear. Something fluffy brushes against his cheek, and then a long tongue swats his nose, and he realizes it’s his teleporting space wolf who’s warped them out of the godforsaken cave system.

They’re free.

Hands brace his shoulders and cup his cheek, and Keith could cry at how relieving it is to hear Shiro’s voice. He squints as best he can through his lashes, trying to show that he’s alright, but the world is blinding and his head is pounding, so he smiles as reassuringly as he can instead. He’s carefully propped up into a sitting position, and after a minute or so Hunk’s bracer is being worked off his arm and replaced with something cold. He crumples back into Shiro’s arms, beyond ready to fall into unconsciousness, but another hand tentatively touches his shoulder, and Lance’s voice is careful and low, asking, “You okay, buddy?”

“Peachy,” Keith grumbles, but can’t help the way his lips quirk upwards. When he had been two years lost in the quantum abyss he had missed his fellow paladins terribly, but had bolstered himself with the absolute certainty he would see them again. Perhaps he had taken their reunion for granted when he marched back and took up the position of team leader, or perhaps this brush with death has unsettled him more than he’d like to admit – whatever the case, the attention of his found family has Keith feeling only about as obstinate as melted butter, and twice as warm. He blinks a few times in a new bid to adjust to the light, and though his eyes burn at its intensity, the discomfort is absolutely worth seeing something other than stone walls.

“We missed you too, man, don’t have to cry about it,” comes the joke, but Lance’s matching smile is soft in Keith’s watery vision.

He hears Hunk laughing, wildly and loudly, and turns to find him as a mass of limbs on the floor. A mop of sandy hair is poking out from behind one of his arms, and much smaller set of hands are wound tightly around his shoulders. He’s enveloped Pidge in a hug so tight Keith worries she might not be able to breathe, but her hiss of, “Can you quit being cute for a second?! I’m trying to tell you what happened!” as her pink cheeks resurface from his hug confirms Keith has nothing to worry about but her embarrassment. 

Above them, Allura and Coran are smothering laughter, their hands pressed to their mouths. The last knot of anxiety in Keith’s chest unfurls at seeing her safe, a concern he had had to push to the backburner in favour of making sure he and Hunk escaped alive. 

Things calm down at about the same speed that Keith’s vision returns, and he finds himself eventually sitting on a broad plain of scrubland, not entirely unlike the desert he found the blue lion in so long ago. The team has a canopy set up for shade and a mess of instruments piled underneath it, and they’ve marked a grid across the ground like paleontologists would at a dig site. Several folding tables are fitted under the tent, all overflowing with scanners and monitors, half of which are modified Pidge-style, and most of which don’t look familiar at all. The Green Paladin waves an impatient hand when he asks and says they were commandeered (“Stolen,” says Lance; “Borrowed,” insists Allura) from the locals, and then barrels onto explaining what had happened.

The Ro-beast that jumped them upon entry to this planet had employed short-range teladuv-like technology, and had spent most of their battle warping paladins either into the path of friendly fire or as far from the battlefield as possible. Allura had found herself and her lion wedged between buildings in the nearby city at one point, and Lance had been thrown a few thousand feet straight up through the stratosphere, which – as Lance can’t help chipping in, gesturing wildly with his arms for storytelling effect – had put him in perfect position to kamikaze down like a meteor and ram the creature with everything the red lion had.

Given its range, the team thought they had narrowed down the possible places Hunk and Keith could be after the battle to a one kilometre radius. A full day of fruitless searching had gone by before the locals informed Shiro of the subterranean cave system below where they had fought.

“Of course, the system is hundreds of kilometres long, and either there’s some kind of iron alloy down there that was messing with the hyperspectrometer I was using or it needs some serious recalibration. We couldn’t get a read on you, even though I was searching with every type of sensor we had available. Coran even helped me put together a quintessence telometer that was supposed to latch on to the energy cores of your armour–”

“Our suits powered off,” Hunk supplies, folded in a cloth chair and looking worn, but addressing Pidge’s enthusiasm with a fond smile. She jumps up at the confession, and starts bombarding him with questions. Keith tunes out as soon as they get going, the train of conversation officially derailed and his brain too fuzzy to bother trying to follow. 

There’s a nudge at his side before he can fully nod off to sleep, and a soft, “C’mon, we’re packing up soon and Coran wants you in a pod,” encouraging him to rise from his chair. He doesn’t necessarily need a body to lean against, but exhaustion muffles his would-be complaints, and Lance seems determined to sling Keith’s arm around his neck and physically haul him up the loading ramp and into the belly of the black lion. They’ve stored the castleship’s portable cryopods here, though the only one plugged in and active is the same Shiro had rested in when first brought back from the dead. That should be uncomfortable, but the concept barely registers to Keith’s lagging brain.

He shucks off his stiff flight suit and the remains of his armour easily enough, ignoring Lance’s jabs about how badly he needs a bath (he knows it, but he’ll absolutely fall asleep in any given source of water and drown if he doesn’t rest first). His crudely-wrapped arm makes pulling the tight-fitting limbs of the cryopod bodysuit on difficult, though. Lance gives him a long, withered look from across the room before he finally comes to help, but he’s gentle with Keith’s wrist and doesn’t point out how awkward the situation is.

Something about the close proximity and Lance’s inability to look him in the eye tickles a memory in the back of Keith’s brain. He reels it in slowly, and the desperate want to prove he can be a supportive leader comes along for the ride, flagging at him like the silver of a lure on the end of a fishing line. 

“Hunk told me you like guys,” he blurts, “Romantically.”

“He _WHAT?!”_ Lance jumps away as though the cryosuit has electrified him, his eyes as wide as saucers and posture rigid. He looks both like he’s ready to bolt out of the room and take on an entire army barehanded. His voice cracks on the last syllable of his shout, and he immediately starts squawking excuses and denials, something Keith is certain the both of them know is a faint attempt at covering up his utter embarrassment. His face blotches with colour, speckling under his eyes and peaking at his cheekbones.

“I just– if you do, it’s okay,” Keith adds, awkwardly trying to backpedal, tension building in his temples from the noise and confusion at his own actions. He turns to the loops and buttons on the front of his pod suit, trying to notch them together where Lance has left off. His fingers are clammy, and keep fumbling with the catch. “That’d make three of us.”

He becomes so absorbed in the frustrating failure of his work that he doesn’t notice Lance reapproaching until he’s snatching the fasteners away and doing them up in quick succession. The Red Paladin swats Keith’s good arm and points him towards the horizontal pod, already lit up and hissing steam as its temperature meets the air of the room. He hovers like a concerned nanny as Keith clambers his way into the pod with one arm, wiggling into the claustrophobic space as gracefully as he can. As soon as he’s seated Lance zips to the control panel, and the blue light of the screen adds a new layer of colour to the blatant blush that’s bled from his ears to his neck.

“I should set the timer for a good thirty-two hours, see if we can fix that brain of yours,” he mutters, and Keith is honestly on board with that, as bone-tired as he is. “I like Allura, and girls in general, and I dunno where Hunk got that idea but he’s gonna get his head chewed off as soon as I’m done with you.” Lance rambles on for a while longer, growing less agitated as he focuses on the holoscreen and its specifics, and Keith can’t help admiring the dramatic highlights the glare of the tech give his face. He thinks he may have zoned out completely when Lance taps him on the arm and gestures for him to lay down, and Keith startles. 

“Isn’t three out of seven people an unrealistic percentage?” the Red Paladin asks, his eyes turned away as Keith wedges himself into the pod as comfortably as he can, pulling his hair to one side so it doesn’t tickle his face. He can’t help snorting. It’s the same kind of cynicism he’d expressed a lifetime ago, sitting with his only friend on the Garrison rooftop, hands twisted in anxiousness, bleeding out questions he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in with as much vigor as the setting sun was bleeding colour. 

“Shiro says we travel in packs.”

Lance scoffs, but when he speaks his tone is hushed, and ribbed with more affection than shame. He slides the glass cover over the top of the pod and engages the latch, murmuring, “Then I’m gonna have to tell Shiro that ‘packs’ is a stupid term for us when there’s an obvious ‘pride’ pun right there. Get some rest, buddy, you look like hell.”

“Missed you too,” Keith hums, and his vision falls shut on a familiar smile as a cool breeze drags him into slumber.

\----

He wakes up some hours later to an orange moustache and twinkling blue eyes, and Coran easily hefts Keith out of the cryopod and into his arms before he’s woken enough to protest. He rubs at his face as the advisor sets him on a nearby crate and tests out his formerly-broken wrist’s range of motion, yawns through a couple of questions, nods a consent to the nutrient-replenishing device Coran plugs into his thigh, and then drags himself to the cockpit of his lion, where he reclines the pilot’s chair and curls up to sleep again. It’s not his usual style – he’s an early riser and a light sleeper, always more eager to experience than rest, but he’s well and truly beat. He nudges the brightness of the holodisplays and internal lighting to full blast, and for once doesn’t hate how the glow digs at the back of his eyelids. The illumination feels like spaciousness, like daytime, like an Earth sun he never realized he missed.

Keith suspects his circadian rhythms are completely thrown off, too, because he wakes at 04:00CT like a switch has been thrown in his head, and he can’t roll back into the depths of sleep no matter how hard he presses his face into the chair cushioning. He rises and walks around, instead, first marching laps between the cockpit and cargo hold and then outdoors, where the local sunrise is just starting to peek over the flat horizon. He finds Hunk on the one visible hilltop, as out of place among the scrubgrass as the sharp angles of the skyscrapers are in the city to the west. He’s laying on his stomach, head pillowed in his arms, like a sunbather on a quiet beach.

His eyes aren’t closed, though, Keith realizes when he approaches, just turned away, staring out at the crest of the red dwarf sun like he’s trying to burn the image into his retinas. He startles when Keith sits down beside him, but the tension only lasts as long as the surprise.

“Can’t sleep,” Hunk offers. “It’s stupid, I had all the lights on and Yellow purring in my head and still felt scared. Being in there reminded me of the cave, except a nightmare version where I didn’t find you.”

“Stuff like that can stick,” Keith says, acknowledging the sensation, and for a moment they stare at each other, savouring the natural light over the haze of a dying bayard. Hunk looks away first.

“Forever?” he asks. “This doesn’t feel the same as– like, when we form Voltron, when we’re fighting the galra or on a mission, I can tune out all the unimportant things I’ve been worrying about. I can turn that stuff off. This feels like it’s… clinging to me.” 

Keith knows exactly what he’s asking: if he’ll ever be able to sleep in the dark again, if the sound of slowly dripping water will throw him into a panic, if he’ll relive the idea of dying alone in the bowels of the earth in full detail every time something triggers the memory. He wants to know if he has to deal with this on top of all of the rest of the trauma associated with warfare. He’s asking Keith because of the two of them, he would know – Keith dreams often about the quantum abyss, about Blades who died just outside his reach, about thousands of copies of Shiro falling into a void and his fingers losing their grip on the first person he ever dared to trust. He’s asking Keith because he needs someone to tell him he’s going to be okay. He’s asking Keith because he needs the confidence of a leader and a friend to believe in.

“Eventually,” Keith tries, and Hunk looks at him with his brows drawn. Maybe he’s aware that Keith’s putting on a show of sureness. Maybe he doesn’t believe that the two extra years of experience Keith has over the rest of the team means anything. Maybe words aren’t the kind of reassurance that works for him, or maybe Keith is just bad at speaking. The Black Paladin lays down with him, propping his chin on his forearms, hoping that a physical show of solidarity might be more encouraging than his failed articulation.

Maybe Hunk is looking out for the both of them, because he reaches out and nudges the white of Keith’s hand with the deep brown of his own knuckles, and sighs, soft and relieved, as Keith takes the hint and winds their fingers together.

The dawn builds slowly, bathing them in warmth and leaving hazy spots behind their eyelids. A soft breeze cleanses the air and jostles the bristly grass under his cheek. Hunk’s breathing beside him grows slow and heavy. 

Keith falls asleep in sunlight.


End file.
